DVD Savant review:"The classic bits are two vampire skits with guest stars John Travolta and James Woods. Woods is so funny, we wonder if he's wasted his career in straight roles. Also strong are Al Franken's intense Stuart Smalley bit, the Coneheads routine and Rich the Copy Guy. Others have a knee-jerk nostalgic appeal, like the original Land Shark gag, and there's nothing bad about the Twilight Zone Eye of the Beholder takeoff with Pamela Anderson. Perhaps cued by the Myers-Carvey Wayne's World best-of skits used as bookends, the show leans heavily in favor of mean-spirited humor ... not a bad thing for Halloween, I suppose."

Impresionante recopilatorio de rarezas cinematográficas rescatadas de copias de nitrato inflamable. Consta de 54 cortometrajes que contabilizan más de 7 horas de obras. Incluye:
DISC ONE
NEW BEGINNINGS: Seven films including the early cinematic experiments of Lumière, Georges Mendel and others, featuring Cyrano De Bergerac from 1900, believed to be the first color and sound film.
MAGICAL MOVIES: Five early fantasy and trick films, including a previously-unseen trick film by Georges Méliès, hand-colored films from Segundo de Chomon and Gaston Velle, and astonishing stop-motion animation from 1911.
SEEING THE WORLD: Among the ten films in this section: A transatlantic crossing in a Zeppelin dirigible, a stencil-colored trek through the Belgian Congo in 1925, Parisian street kids in Montmartre during the first World War, a 1916 visit to Los Angeles, 1927 sound film of Charles Lindbergh embarking on his New York-Paris flight, an early 1930s portrait of New York’s Coney Island, and a film promoting Josephine Baker’s revue at the Folies-Bergère.
DISC TWO
LAUGHING LIKE WE USED TO: Seven comedies, including four restored from turn of the century Italy and France, a recently-discovered nitrate negative of Chaplin’s first appearance in his “tramp” attire, a frenetic Mack Sennett gag fest with tin lizzies galore, and The Pest, starring an early Stan Laurel (before Hardy).
DRAWINGS AND MODELS: Six works of animation: Gaumont’s Fantasmagorie (1908), three cartoons from the Fleischer Studios – Cartoon Factory (1924), Ain’t She Sweet (1932), and Play Safe (1936) – Ub Iwerks' Balloonland (1935) featuring a new color restoration made from the original negatives, and a filmed performance by puppetry pioneer Tony Sarg.
GRACE NOTES: Rare musical performances: Django Reinhardt with Stéphane Grapelli and the Quintet of the Hot Club of France, Duke Ellington and the Cotton Club Orchestra, Louis Armstrong, and the Utica Jubilee Singers.
DISC THREE
PERSUADE ME: Eleven films designed to influence, including vintage promotional films featuring Laurel & Hardy (dubbed in French), Michel Simon and Jacques Tati, puppet animation by George Pal, three WW-II era musical shorts, two political campaign films, and Master Hands, a paean to the 1936 Chevrolet, selected for the National Film Registry.
TELL ME A STORY: Narratives from 1912-1913 by D.W. Griffith (For His Son), Lois Weber (Suspense), and Thomas Ince (The Heart of an Indian), all mastered from beautiful 35 mm film elements.

Caroline Leaf’s animated work springs from her expert storytelling and pioneering animation techniques. One significant contribution to filmmaking is her technique of manipulating sand on a light-box, which she began as a student at Harvard. She later worked as an animator and director at the National Film Board of Canada. Her film The Street garnered an Academy Award nomination in 1976. On this episode, she screens the remarkable The Owl Who Married a Goose: An Eskimo Legend and parts of The Street and The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa which were works-in-progress at the time. Visit her personal website at www.carolineleaf.com.

Mary Beams’ hand-drawn films carry themes of memory, erotic fantasy and feminism. She taught animation at Harvard from 1972 to 1977, and by 1988, she was a partner in Media Ink, Inc., with a weekly animated political spot on NBC’s Sunday Today Show. She has also taught at the University of South Florida and Northern Illinois University. Here, she screens The Tub, Solo Film, Going Home Sketch-book, Piano Rub, and her work-in-progress, Quilt Film.

About the Screening Room seriesIn the early 1970s a group of idealistic artists, lawyers, doctors and teachers saw an opportunity to change commercial television in Boston and the surrounding area. It would require years of litigation up to and including the Supreme Court, but the case was won and the Channel 5 license was given to WCVB-TV. Screening Room was one of several programs offered in an effort to provide alternative television viewing. The idea behind Screening Room was to give independent filmmakers an opportunity to discuss their work and show it to a large urban audience. Nearly 100 ninety-minute programs were produced and aired between 1973 and 1980.

Screening Room was developed and hosted by filmmaker Robert Gardner, who at the time, was Director of Harvard's Visual Arts Center and Chairman of its Visual and Environmental Studies Department. His own films include Dead Birds (1964), and Forest of Bliss (1986).

Derek Lamb appeared on Screening Room in June 1973 with over a dozen films and film clips that demonstrated a wide range of animation techniques, including The Rocket, The Great Toy Robbery, I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, Housemoving, and The Shepherd. In September 1975, Lamb returned to the program to screen and discuss the films The Last Cartoon Man and The Psychic Parrot.

This disc has the extra Derek Lamb visits Robert Gardner in 2005 (audio/slide show, 28 min).

Over the course of a remarkable career spanning more than four decades, Derek Lamb contributed to over two hundred film and video productions as director, producer, animator, composer, and even as a singer. His film credits include the Academy Award-winning shorts Special Delivery and Every Child, as well as The Sweater, Why Me, The Great Toy Robbery, Karate Kids and The Shepherd. He is also known for animating the opening credits for the PBS series Mystery!. He taught animation at Harvard and McGill Universities and at the National Institute of Design in India.

Ed Emshwiller appeared on Screening Room in July 1975 to screen and discuss the films:

Chrysalis (excerpt, 1:18)

George Dumpson's Place (full film, 7:45)

Carol Emshwiller (full film, 5:50)

Thanatopsis (full film, 5:12)

Film With Three Dancers (full film, 18:58)

Scape Mates (full film, 1:59)

Crossings and Meetings (excerpt, 2:03)

Ed Emshwiller started out as an abstract expressionist painter and an award-winning science fiction illustrator before becoming a major figure in avant-garde cinema and the experimental film movement of the 1960s and '70s. Eventually a highly respected video artist and dean at the School of Film/Videoo at the California Institute of the Arts, Emshwiller was always looking for ways to push the boundaries of film and video. He was a pioneer of computer-generated video and combining technology with art. Many of his films, including Relativity, Totem, Film with Three Dancers, and Thanatopsis received screenings and awards at New York, Cannes and other major film festivals worldwide.

“Emshwiller is mad, truly mad. Only mediocre craftsmen are like everybody else. The truly great craftsmen are creatures with demons at their service. And thus the borders of art and craft disappear in the mystery of created and found reality.” — Jonas Mekas

“An artist like Ed whose work spanned from commercial illustration to the most rarified filmic experimentation is a mystery and a turbulence between an eye and a hand; everything that goes on there can be informative.” — Samuel Delaney, Intersecting Images: The Cinema of Ed Emshwiller

About the Screening Room series

In the early 1970s a group of idealistic artists, lawyers, doctors and teachers saw an opportunity to change commercial television in Boston and the surrounding area. It would require years of litigation up to and including the Supreme Court, but the case was won and the Channel 5 license was given to WCVB-TV. Screening Room was one of several programs offered in an effort to provide alternative television viewing. The idea behind Screening Room was to give independent filmmakers an opportunity to discuss their work and show it to a large urban audience. Nearly 100 ninety-minute programs were produced and aired between 1973 and 1980.

John and Faith Hubley worked as a team over many years to set standards for creative animation. Beginning at Disney, they moved on to develop new techniques, such as watercolor work on paper, and to offer bold political content. They were the first to combine animation with jazz, working with such artists as Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, and Oscar Peterson. Later they were commissioned by Sesame Street to create television animation for children. The Hubleys received Academy Awards for Moonbird (1960), The Hole (1963), and Tijuana Brass Double Feature (1966).

John and Faith Hubley appeared on Screening Room in April 1973 to discuss and screen their films Eggs, The Hat, Children of the Sun, and Zuckerkandl.

Abstract computer animator, inventor and digital pioneer John Whitney, Sr. (1917-1995) is widely considered the "father of Computer Graphics." Whitney's films reveal his deep interest in technology as a means to art, as well as in the links he saw between music and visual forms. A resident at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and later on the faculty at UCLA and the California Institute of Technology, Whitney experimented with early computer graphic systems and worked alongside IBM programmers to expand the computer's graphic capabilities. He has received many awards. Originally working with his brother, James, Whitney leaves a legacy of image making in his three sons, John Jr., Mark, and Michael, who are also filmmakers.

John Whitney was a guest on the inaugural episode of Screening Room in November, 1972. He showed and discussed Permutations, 1-2-3-Osaka, Matrix, Matrix III and a film by his son, John Whitney Jr., calledTerminal Self.

“The foremost computer-filmmaker in the world, John Whitney has for more than thirty years sought new language through technological resources beyond human capacity. He has, however, remained resolutely "humanist" in his approach, constantly striving to reach deep emotional awarenesses through a medium essentially austere and clinical.” — Gene Younggblood

In March 1977 Michael Snow appeared on Screening Room. He discussed and screened excerpts from his film Rameau's Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (10:48/18:57/7:29/0:55).

"Michael Snow is the dean of structural filmmakers. Whereas the three earlier fims Ñ Wavelength, Back and Forth, and La Région CentraleÑpropose modes of camera movement as modes of cognition, Rameau's Nephew explores the whole human body as a field of epistemological inquiry. Speaking, focusing, singing, urinating, laughing, reading, whistling, flatulating, eating, hand tapping, and fornicating are chief among the types of bodily activity and noise heard and discussed in the film." –P. Adams Sitney
Canadian Michael Snow has worked in painting, sculpture, and music as well as film, where he has proved one of the most renowned and influential of all experimental filmmakers. He played a major role in the "structural" film movement with such works as Wavelength (1967), Back and Forth (1969), and La Région Centrale (1971), exploring the world through deliberate and explicit decisions about formal approaches. Snow has been honored with solo exhibitions or film retrospectives at the Venice Biennale, New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Paris Centre Pompidou and Cinémathèque Française, and elsewhere.

visit the Michael Snow page at Maya Stendhal Gallery

About the Screening Room series

In the early 1970s a group of idealistic artists, lawyers, doctors and teachers saw an opportunity to change commercial television in Boston and the surrounding area. It would require years of litigation up to and including the Supreme Court, but the case was won and the Channel 5 license was given to WCVB-TV. Screening Room was one of several programs offered in an effort to provide alternative television viewing. The idea behind Screening Room was to give independent filmmakers an opportunity to discuss their work and show it to a large urban audience. Nearly 100 ninety-minute programs were produced and aired between 1973 and 1980.

Screening Room was developed and hosted by filmmaker Robert Gardner, who at the time, was Director of Harvard's Visual Arts Center and Chairman of its Visual and Environmental Studies Department. His own films include Dead Birds (1964), and Forest of Bliss (1986).

Drawing on traditions of 19th-century landscape painting and still photography, Peter Hutton’s contemplative, meticulously composed films unfold as a series of tableaux separated by black leader. His work, primarily minimalist, silent portraits of cities and landscapes, has been shown at important festivals and in major museums across Europe and the United States including the Museum of Modern Art and five Whitney Biennials. He has received the Dutch Film Critics Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation. He has taught at Hampshire College, Harvard University, SUNY Purchase, and has been a Professor of Film at Bard College since 1984.

Peter Hutton appeared on Screening Room in March 1977 to screen and discuss excerpts from the films July ’71 in San Francisco…, Images of Asian Music, Florence, New York Near Sleep for Saskia, and footage from New York Portrait: Chapter One.

Robert Fulton was an extraordinary non-fiction filmmaker and gifted aerial cinematographer who left a legacy of remarkable films shot all over the world. He was an exceptional pilot, a devout Buddhist and a brilliant independent thinker and talker. He taught for a time in Harvard's Visual and Environmental Studies Department and worked closely with Robert Gardner on large and small projects over several decades. He won many awards, including an Emmy for work in television. Fulton died in a private airplane crash in 2002 whereupon Harvard Film Study Center established the Robert E. Fulton III Fund for new filmmakers in memorium.

“Robert Fulton is an artist of rare complexity and depth. One uses the term 'artist' for Fulton only for lack of a better word. Germans might call Fulton a LebenskYnstler, a "life artist," because his real art form is his own life not just his enigmatic, stubbornly mute photographs, his lyrical aerial cinematography, his labyrinthine films, his dense, defiantly poetic and resolutely metaphysical prose. Fulton is a juggler and a combiner, combining ideas and images that don't really belong together into new definitions of what may well belong together.” — Lito Tejada-Flores, Author

Robert Fulton appeared on Screening Room in April 1973, and returned in April 1979. In this episode, he screened:

Robert Fulton was an extraordinary non-fiction filmmaker and gifted aerial cinematographer who left a legacy of remarkable films shot all over the world. He was an exceptional pilot, a devout Buddhist and a brilliant independent thinker and talker. He taught for a time in Harvard's Visual and Environmental Studies Department and worked closely with Robert Gardner on large and small projects over several decades. He won many awards, including an Emmy for work in television. Fulton died in a private airplane crash in 2002 whereupon Harvard Film Study Center established the Robert E. Fulton III Fund for new filmmakers in memorium.

Robert Fulton appeared on Screening Room in April 1973, and returned in April 1979 to screen the films Street Film, Path of Cessation and Chant.

Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) is widely regarded as the most important American avant-garde filmmaker. He referred to his films as "visual music," and in them he pushed the boundaries of experimental cinema, from observational films with fresh approaches to seeing the world, to innovative use of such techniques as scratching and painting directly onto the film stock. Brakhage regarded life as an "adventure of perception," and this attitude is at the heart of all his unpredictable and visually stunning work. He was the first filmmaker to receive the prestigious MacDowell Medal in the creative arts, and he was the recipient of many other awards and retrospectives throughout the world. He was always an articulate writer and spokesman for independent cinema, taught for many years at the University of Colorado, and inspired and aided many younger artists.

Stan Brakhage first appeared on Screening Room in May, 1973 to screen and discuss the films Eye Myth, Desist Film, Wonder Ring, Window Water Baby Moving, Moth Light, Blue Moses, Machine of Eden and The Wold Shadow. He returned to the program in the fall of 1980, where he showed Window, two excerpts from Short Films: 1975, Roman Numeral Series I and Creation.

“[Brakhage's] great desire was to make cinema equal to the other arts by using that which was uniquely cinematic - by organizing light in the time and space of the projected image - in a way that would be worthy, structurally and aesthetically, of the poetry, painting, and music that most inspired him.” — Fred Camper, film writer/lecturerAbout the Screening Room seriesIn the early 1970s a group of idealistic artists, lawyers, doctors and teachers saw an opportunity to change commercial television in Boston and the surrounding area. It would require years of litigation up to and including the Supreme Court, but the case was won and the Channel 5 license was given to WCVB-TV. Screening Room was one of several programs offered in an effort to provide alternative television viewing. The idea behind Screening Room was to give independent filmmakers an opportunity to discuss their work and show it to a large urban audience. Nearly 100 ninety-minute programs were produced and aired between 1973 and 1980.

Screening Room was developed and hosted by filmmaker Robert Gardner, who at the time, was Director of Harvard's Visual Arts Center and Chairman of its Visual and Environmental Studies Department. His own films include Dead Birds (1964), and Forest of Bliss (1986).

A professor of art history and film, a photographer and an inventor, Standish Lawder has made truly experimental films by seeing what a predetermined idea about content, structure, or technique will produce when carried out in shooting or printing. Lawder has taught at Harvard, Yale, UC San Diego, and at Denver Darkroom, which he founded. He is the author of The Cubist Cinema.

A distinguished philosopher and professor at Harvard, Stanley Cavell had just published The World Viewed, his first book on film, when he appeared on this program. His subsequent writing on film includes Pursuits of Happiness and Contesting Tears.

In this episode of Screening Room, Lawder demonstrates the intricacies of his home-made optical printer and shows examples of what can be achieved with rephotographing film. Gardner, Lawder, and Cavell also discuss the intellectual and psychological implications of his manipulations. Their frank commentary carries on over Lawder's test print of Intolerance, which he had just received from the lab and had not yet viewed it himself. Lawder also screens Necrology, Color Film, and Corridor.

"Standish Lawder is a cinematic magician, an American original. His films are an astonishing mix of formal beauty, structural rigor, and probing wit. He is a high-wire performer, with no net." — Clifford Ross, photographer/inventor of the R1 camera.

In March 1977, Yvonne Rainer appeared on Screening Room with film scholar and author Deac Rossell, to screen and discuss excerpts from her film Kristina Talking Pictures (5:04/8:51/8:54/2:10/8:33/5:36).

Relentless exploration of the nature of performance, the construction of meaning, and the relations of the sexes has guided Yvonne Rainer's long career, first in avant–garde choreography and dance and then in filmmaking. Her honors include Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships along with numerous exhibitions of her work, including recent retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York. Her other films include Lives of Performers (1972), Film About a Woman Who... (1974), The Man Who Envied Women (1985), Privilege (1991), and Murder and Murder (1996).

"Yvonne Rainer is a pivotal figure in the history of 20th-century American art. Credited with inventing the term “post-modern dance,” she was among its leading thinker–practitioners from the early 1960's until 1975 when she stopped performing. Since the mid–1970s, at a crucial point in the development of feminist filmmaking, she has been one of its leading innovators, opening up feminist film to alternative possibilities, and forging a new film language at the juncture of aesthetics and politics." – Claire MacDonald, Performance Research, 2001

The horrific war in Chechnya, a neighbor of Georgia, gives a special poignancy to Otar Iosseliani’s fascinating, four-hour, made-for-television documentary on Georgia which, like his delightful Chasing Butterflies (SFIFF 1993), was produced in France. Iosseliani presents the history of this former Soviet republic through beautifully interwoven images of landscapes, artwork and clips from other Georgian filmmakers such as Nikoloz Shengalaya and Tenghiz Abuladze. He illuminates the part played recently by two politicians, both KGB men but with very different destinies: Zviad Gamsakhurdia, an ultranationalistic demagogue who died in exile; and Eduard Shevardnadze, who is the president of Georgia today. Iosseliani divides his film into three sections, “Prelude,” “Temptation” and “Trial,” which move from early Georgian history through the 1801 Russian takeover and on into 20th-century events—the Russian Revolution, perestroika and the recent civil war. Alone, Georgia gives a spellbinding evocation of this beautiful, hospitable land, whose torment is, according to Iosseliani, “a symptom of what takes place at this moment in our planet, and gives us a chance to measure the magnitude of the modern human tragedy.”

Sinopsis: Long considered lost until a complete dupe negative was identified in the vaults of La Cinémathèque française last year, this William Gillette film is a vital missing link in the history of Sherlock Holmes on screen. By the time it was produced at Essanay Studios in 1916, Gillette had been established as the world’s foremost interpreter of Holmes on stage—having played him approximately 1300 times since his 1899 debut. This newly-restored edition, thanks to the monumental efforts of both the San Francisco Silent Film Festival and La Cinémathèque française, represents the sole surviving appearance of Gillette’s Holmes on film.

Extras:

From Lost to Found: Restoring William Gillette's Sherlock Holmes, presented by film restorer Robert Byrne at the 2015 San Francisco Silent Film Festival (2015, 24 min.)

Sherlock Holmes Baffled: courtesy of the Library of Congress and presented in HD, this is the earliest known film to feature the character of Sherlock Holmes (1900, 1 min.)

A Canine Sherlock: from the EYE Film Institute, the film stars Spot the Dog as the titular character (1912, 15 min.)

Più forte che Sherlock Holmes: also from the EYE Film Institute, this entertaining Italian trick-film owes as much to Méliès as it does to Doyle (1913, 7 min.)

Late Conan Doyle Talks to You About the Beyond: interview with Arthur Conan Doyle from the Fox Movietone Collection (1928, 12 min.)

Sherlock Holmes Turns Engineer: outtakes from a 1930 newsreel with William Gillette showing off his amateur railroad (1930, 6 min.)

Along with Anger's SCORPIO RISING and Warhol's CHELSEA GIRLS, Mike Kuchar's SINS OF THE FLESHAPOIDS remains one of the most influential films of the '60s American Underground. Mike and his co-writer brother George were the godfathers of bargain basement cinema, pioneering a hilariously campy, lurid style between Ed Wood exploitation and Douglas Sirk melodrama. Set a million years in the future, after "The Great War" has scourged the planet, mankind has forsaken science for self-indulgence in all the carnal pleasures afforded by art, food, and lust. Work is left to a race of enslaved androids. One rebellious male robot tires of pampering his lazy masters, and joins the humans in sin.

Special Features

Directors commentary

Booklet featuring Jack Stevenson's interview with Kuchar

Two featurettes from the Kuchar catalog: "The Secret of Wendel Samson" and "The Craven Sluck"

Andy Griffith - in a brilliant departure from his television persona as a country sheriff - stars in Luigi Pirandello's modern classic, along with Academy Award-winner John Houseman (The Paper Chase). A ground breaking work which has exerted a considerable influence on 20th Century drama, Six Characters is directed by Stacy Keach, who has transposed the play's traditional theatrical setting to a television studio. As a group of actors prepare for a rehearsal of another Pirandello play - The Rules of the Game - the television monitors in the control booth give way to an electrical interference which inexplicably replaces the images of the actors with the images of six mysterious strangers.

Impresionante edición doble del film seminal de Richard Linklater. Esta edición de Criterion incluye:
# - DISC ONE
# - New high-definition digital transfer, with restored image and sound supervised by director Richard Linklater and director of photography Lee Daniel, made from original 16mm film elements
# - Three audio commentaries featuring Richard Linklater and members of the cast and crew
# - Casting tapes featuring select "auditions" from the over one-hundred-member cast, with an essay from production manager/casting director Anne Walker-McBay
# - An early film treatment
# - Home movies
# - Ten-minute trailer for a documentary about the landmark Austin café, Les Amis, which served as location for several scenes in Slacker
# - Stills gallery featuring hundreds of rare behind-the-scenes production and publicity photos
# - DISC TWO
# - It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (1988), Linklater's first full-length feature, with commentary by the director, available here for the first time on home video
# - Woodshock, an early short 16mm film made by Linklater and Lee Daniel in 1985
# - "The Roadmap," the working script of Slacker, including fourteen deleted scenes and alternate takes
# - Footage from the Slacker tenth-anniversary in Austin, Texas, in 2001
# - Original theatrical trailer
# - Slacker culture essay by Linklater
# - Information about the Austin Film Society, founded in 1985 by Linklater with Daniel, including early flyers from screenings

Surely the most singular of events in the annual calendar of film culture, the Midnight Sun Film Festival is held every June in the Finnish village of Sodankylä beyond the arctic circle—where the sun never sets. Founded by Aki and Mika Kaurismäki along with Anssi Mänttäri and Peter Von Bagh in 1985, the festival has played host to an international who’s who of directors and each day begins with a two-hour discussion. To mark the festival’s silver anniversary, festival director Peter Von Bagh edited together highlights from these dialogues to create an epic four-part choral history of cinema drawn from the anecdotes, insights, and wisdom of his all-star cast: Coppola, Fuller, Forman, Chabrol, Corman, Demy, Kieslowski, Kiarostami, Varda, Oliveira, Erice, Rouch, Gilliam, Jancso—and 64 more! Ranging across innumerable topics (war, censorship, movie stars, formative influences, America, neorealism) these voices, many now passed away, engage in a personal dialogue across the years that’s by turns charming, profound, hilarious and moving. Call it Finland’s idiosyncratic and playful answer to Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema!

PART 1: The Century of CinemaPART 2: The Yearning of the First Film ExperiencePART 3: Eternal TimePART 4: Drama of Light

Peter von Bagh's essay documentary is the story of an artistic family Aho-Soldan-Brofeldt, whose influence has been important in Finnish art throughout decades of the 20th century. Author Juhani Aho, painter Venny Soldan-Brofeldt, cinematographers Heikki Aho and Bjorn Soldan and photographer Claire Aho are the main characters. The film moves between different eras - things are repeated, they evolve, they emerge in a new form. At the focus, we have half a century of history of Finland and Finnish culture, very versatile.

Sunrise at Campobello is a 1960 biographical film made by Dore Schary Productions and Warner Bros. It tells the story of the initial struggle by future President of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) and his family when he was stricken with paralysis at the age of 39 in August 1921.

Video Data Bank is pleased to announce the publication of the DVD box set edition of Surveying the First Decade: Video Art and Alternative Media in the U.S. Since its original release in 1995, this comprehensive two-volume, eight program package on the history of experimental and independent video has only been available on VHS tape. The DVD launch will bring this essential tool for the understanding of the development of media arts to a whole new generation of teachers, libraries, students and researchers.

The entire anthology (Volumes 1 & 2) includes more than 16 hours of historic video: 68 seminal titles by 60+ artists curated into eight programs ranging from conceptual, performance-based, feminist, and image-processed works, to documentary and grassroots community-based genres. The box set is accompanied by REWIND, a 200+ page study guide with curator’s essay, program and tape descriptions, extended bibliography, biographies and videographies of artists and a guide to collections of early video materials.

“The release of this fabulous comprehensive history of independent video art couldn’t be more timely. It is especially critical for this vital and diverse history to appear now, when there is a whole new generation of videomakers and viewers.”--Martha Rosler, artist, educator and critic

In his one-of-a-kind fiction/documentary hybrid Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, director William Greaves presides over a beleaguered film crew in New York’s Central Park, leaving them to try to figure out what kind of movie they’re making. A couple enacts a break-up scenario over and over, a documentary crew films a crew filming the crew, locals wander casually into the frame: the project defies easy description. Yet this wildly innovative sixties counterculture landmark remains one of the most tightly focused and insightful movies ever made about making movies. Criterion presents this long-unreleased gem in a special two-disc edition, along with its sequel, Take 2½, made thirty-five years later with executive producers Steven Soderbergh and Steve Buscemi.

SPECIAL EDITION DOUBLE-DISC SET:

DISC ONE: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One

New high-definition digital transfer
Discovering William Greaves, a new documentary on Greaves’s career, featuring Greaves, his wife and coproducer Louise Archambault, actor Ruby Dee, filmmaker St. Clair Bourne, and film scholar Scott MacDonald
Theatrical trailer
Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

DISC TWO: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take 2½
New digital transfer
New video interview with actor Steve Buscemi
Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by critic Amy Taubin and production notes by Greaves for Take One.